ScaleCon 2025 Preview with Taher Hamid (EP 899)

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers where we try to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. Today, I wanted to take a little bit of time and focus on one of the industry's most anticipated events.

It is hard to imagine that as I sit here in the summer of Marv, I took conferences off and I looked at this one and I said, oh man, I should have made the trip. But then again, it's across the Mississippi, so of course I probably wouldn't have. But if you have heard the buzz from last year, 2024, it has been touted as one of the best conferences ever to hit the stage.

This year, it is happening September 25th through the 27th at the Roosevelt in New Orleans. And I am talking about ScaleCon 2025. And of course, joining me to chat all about that, Tahir Hameed from MSP Camp.

Tahir, how are you? Good, man. Wow. You really hyped up ScaleCon.

I hope I don't disappoint this year. I didn't hype it up. Everybody else is hyping it up.

I'm glad to hear that. That's great to hear. I mean, some of those reviews, everybody was like, oh, the best conference I've ever attended.

And now, it's a single stage event, right? Yeah. Those are difficult to do and have everybody completely engaged for the whole conference. Vendors all share the same stage.

Everything's, for the most part, in one room, unless you put the vendors in a separate room. But I've been a part of those. And I've heard people talk about our conferences and be like, man, this is great, got to do more of these.

But to hear what people have said about ScaleCon, best conference ever, come on. Oh, man. I love to hear that.

I've heard it a couple of times, and I'm like, man, are these just my friends that are patting me on the back? But yeah, to me, the single stage format, at least for a growth-focused event, to me is perfect. Because oftentimes, marketing, sales, account management gets siloed, and I don't want it to be siloed. I want to make sure the salespeople understand the marketing concepts, the marketing, understand just the grind the salespeople have to go through, and account management understands the work that it took to get to that person.

We all have to be on the same page, which is why I think that that single track is hopefully just going to be how ScaleCon always is. Now, to give people, I guess, a general understanding, ScaleCon is basically geared to help MSPs, B2B SaaS, in a sense, grow and scale their business. But from a marketing perspective that is not like all of the others where everything is super tied to metrics and lead gen, I mean, you guys do that.

I don't want to make that mistake. But you guys are really true to being practical, being focused, zoning in, in a sense. That has been your shtick from the whole beginning, right? Yeah.

I mean, pretty much. I just believe in the power of inbound marketing, and sometimes inbound marketing isn't as concrete as when you're cold calling and go, oh, X number of calls equals X number of leads. I think I'm a big proponent of magnetic marketing, like creativity sells.

The more great content you create, the more people are attracted to you. So I wanted to take the same approach with ScaleCon. And on the event itself, yeah, there's a lot, everyone, it's funny, everyone says this, like, oh, there's so many conferences, there's so many conferences in MSP, there's so many conferences.

It's like, yeah, but how many growth-focused conferences are there? There's like four. So I'm all about the niche, right? Everyone's like, oh, there's a million podcasts. I'm like, yeah, but how many MSP marketing podcasts are there? There's not many, right? So there's these underserved markets that I just want to make sure we're bringing the best to these underserved markets.

I remember being a marketing person at an MSP, and I just, I felt like I had nothing except Robin Robbins back then, and I didn't even sign up for her stuff. I just remember seeing one thing, I was like, maybe this isn't for me. So I'm just grateful to be able to provide that to the people who need it.

All right. Well, before we dive into this year's event, I want to kind of go back to last year's, because first year event, and it just kind of blew up, at least from my perspective and what I've heard out there. From your perspective, what has been kind of the most surprising thing that came out of it? The way I normally ask it is, what was the aha moment when you knew that you hit it out of the park? I think I was extremely self-conscious going into last year, because I was like, I don't know if this is going to be enough value.

I don't know if I've put on a good enough agenda. I don't know if I've thought through the experience enough. I was very nervous, as I am again this year, to be clear.

So when everyone showed up and I just got so much positive feedback, I'm like, okay, I think a lot of conferences don't put the amount of love that I put into it, and that we as a team, the Tech Tribe, MSP Camp, that we put into it. I just don't think, I think it becomes more of like a checkbox type thing in a lot of conferences. So that gave me hope that we can just keep doing it every year, hopefully as good as that first one.

All right. Because we do probably a ton of love, a ton of time, attention, love in these. I mean, it is my highest priority thing in the months leading up to it.

Right. You mentioned Tech Tribe. In a sense, you guys are kind of co-hosting this, although I see you as the big lead there.

What was it that made you decide to reach out to Nigel and then say, hey, let's do this? I met Nigel for the first time in person. He invited me to a conference called the Magnetic Marketing Conference. It was in Dallas in May of last year, and that was the first time I met him in person.

I've been following him for years because I was a Tech Tribe member. I remember being at that event. It was also a one-stage event, and I remember going, I could do this.

I loved it, to be clear. I loved the event, and I thought I could also do that. So I was sitting with Nigel that evening, and he's like, oh, I want to do one of these, but it'd be like a quarter million dollars.

I was like, what? He's like, oh, yeah, at least a quarter million. I was like, no way. I was like, no way it's going to be a quarter million dollars.

That was kind of the end of the discussion. Two weeks later, I texted him. I was like, I'm about to do an event.

I was like, I'm doing it. I was like, we're just going to do it. I was like, I saw what we did at Magnetic Marketing, or I saw what they did.

We could do it. So I was like, I'm going to do this. I would love for you to join me because I know you wanted to do it.

We talked about it. You were already interested in doing it. Let's just do it.

So I kind of strong-armed him into it, to be honest, but he was on board. He's like, all right, Mike, let's do it. So that was the inception.

Nice. Okay. Okay.

And I don't want to get too much into that. What was that? He still gives me shit about dragging him into scale. I was going to say, did he tell you anything about the money? I told you it was going to be expensive.

And it was even, it was much more expensive than a quarter million, it turns out. This year it's going to be about a half a million. Yeah.

All right. So you are still doing the single stage event, but these sessions, as we talked about, they focus on real world tactics that MSPs can use. What types of sessions can people look forward to, or what are you looking forward to that might be new this year that you didn't have last year? Yeah.

So one thing we're doing new this year that I'm really excited about, it's called the 10 minute tactic series. So day one on the marketing day, which is day one, is we're getting a series of MSP business owners who have just excelled in maybe like one thing. And they're willing to come on stage and share 10 minutes, like exactly how they do that one thing, the exact results that they've gotten out of it, just blessing the crowd with this is what's worked for us.

And one, it also lessens the pressure on those MSP sales or MSP owners, because it's like they may have never speaking on a stage like this their whole life. So it's like, hey, don't worry. You don't got to do some big presentation.

Give us 10 minutes. So I'm very excited about that. Because I think that even if a bunch of sessions don't go well, I think those sessions alone are going to be so tactical and helpful that the MSP, MSP that are there are going to be like, okay, this was worth it.

If it was for that alone. I'm excited that Nigel speaking twice. So last year, he just killed it with the closing keynote this year, he's getting he's doing two presentations.

I did two last year. So now he gets to pull the short stick. So I'm really excited about that.

I love seeing Nigel. I've listened to a ton of Nigel's content. So like to be able to see him live and do it's very exciting to me.

And then kind of lastly, the thing I'm excited about is I'm closing the whole event up with my presentation. So I'm really just spending a ton of time on it and making sure that every minute that I'm up there, someone is getting something of value. My goal is I want that presentation to make them enough money that they want to come back to skill con every year.

So it's like if they came to skill con and just got my presentation, they're going to make enough money to come back every year. So that's kind of my goal. Okay.

So let me piggyback off that for a second. Did you have anybody over the last year tell you, man, I was able to increase sales or do this by X amount? Did they anybody give you real numbers about stuff that they took back from last year? So many people. Yeah.

And that's what is, cause you have to understand the, like I have to, you know, you always hear like the start with the Y or whatever. It's like, I can see people looking at me and be like, why are you doing this? Like you have a growing business that needs your love and attention. You're doing this event that you're a hundred percent going to lose money on.

Like there's no making money the way we're doing it. So it's like you're doing this event that you're going to spend a bunch of time and effort on and you're going to lose money and you're not even selling while you're there. Like why are you doing this? And it's because of the people I heard from.

So I actually pulled a couple of just, these are just some of the emails I had in my inbox recently. So Craig Bell on it said, we started to leverage what we learned at scale con 24 in January of this year, which is 2025. I just got my completed financials to June.

So just six months. And the first 5.5 months this year, we're up $500,000 in top line year over year. Our managed service division is up 82% year over year.

Our MRR contracts are up 66% year over year. So that's just one person. Dan, I don't, I'm not going to use his last name because I didn't ask him.

I'm sure he'd be completely fine from using this, but I'll just say his first name. I was blown away by last year's event, exceeded my expectations and delivered on what I value most empowering MSPs to grow between our existing growth efforts and takeaways from last year's skill con. We're on track to gross over a million dollars more this year compared to last year.

These are specific people that were at scale con saying scale con is helping us get this. And then Tony Flint, a good, good friend of mine and was there, uh, really took the heart of the direct mail session and close his first lead from direct mail, like literally postcards and newsletters and it's $2,000 monthly reoccurring revenue. I don't know how much you're spending on direct mail, but you get a 2000 MRR contract and it's like, wow, that was worth it.

So a lot of people will send direct mail once or twice, spend a few hundred bucks like, Oh, I didn't get anything. It's like, well, yeah, it needs to be a long-term strategy and the MRR will pay for it when it closes. So those are just some like really specific quantifiable data from people that were there and directly attributed to what they've learned.

Yeah. Now, one of the things that I remember from last year is you guys talked about no pitching, no selling. So I assume that you're kind of on that same, uh, trail now this year.

But let me ask, I mean, are you guys really just getting up on stage, giving tactics and not selling? Like, are you not telling people join MSP Camp or join the tech tribe? I mean, how is that? The only selling we do on stage is for the next skill con. Like that was the only pitch we did on the entire stage last year was like, Hey, buy your ticket for a significant discount for next year. Right.

Um, that was the only pitch of the entire event. Um, now this year, because we're, it's a more expensive event. I am going to have a booth, right? Like everybody else.

And it's a 10 by 10, just like every other sponsor. And I, we're not even like the bigger sponsors with the bigger ones. We've got a 10 by 10 booth.

Um, so I am going to have like sales goals there. Uh, so somebody comes to our booth, I'm going to have Maddie kind of, you know, obviously selling MSP Camp, um, and hopefully try to, you know, make some money as if we're just any other sponsor at the event. So we're not getting preferential treatment.

We're not pitching on stage, none of that. We're just a bronze sponsor at this big event that we're spending tens of thousands of dollars on. So, yeah, I mean, hopefully we sell a couple of websites, we sell social media management, maybe an inbound package, scout plus membership.

We have things to sell fortunately, but a hundred percent that isn't even factored into the event. Yeah. Now, how many people are you expecting? Because you got sponsors as if you are a big conference.

So don't try to play that little, little man stuff with me. You guys got a ton of sponsors. Yeah.

I'm very, we, I'm very grateful, um, with how many of the, like the big name sponsors came out. So right now with, with registrations of sponsors and MSPs, we're at 330 people. Um, so we should hit about 400 people will be there at the event.

I would say probably 300 plus of them will be actual MSPs in the room. Okay. I'm just, I'm scaling the website, so I'm not going to say too much about it except that it is a ScaleCon25.com and folks, if you are listening to this, uh, you should get over there.

Uh, because I think I heard you say on a recent podcast, you actually might sell out. Probably not going to sell out of, of tickets, probably all the sponsorships for sure. Um, but tickets we had up to 400 MSPs and I'd be surprised at this point since we have, Oh my gosh, less than three weeks.

That's crazy. I doubt we're going to have an influx of like a hundred plus people register, but maybe so potentially, I know as scarcity says, I should be like, yes, we're going to sell out. But realistically, probably not.

Um, so it's not a full three days, even though they talk about it as a three day event. The first day is really kind of arrival day and then you've got the, the networking event that night and then, uh, two full days of sessions. Right? Exactly.

So my whole, like I want as much value as possible did three days last year and it was literally like very little breaks, very little launch. It was just like session, session, session, session, session, value, value, value, value, value. And like, well actually one of the most prominent feedbacks I got was like it was too much.

And so I was like, fair. So this year we're slowing it down. Um, there was about a day worth of presentations last year that were like not that great.

So I'm like, okay, cool. I can cut it down to two days and actually not lose any of the value and still let people network more and talk more and chill with the sponsors more. And what's that, what's that required of me is just significantly more vetting.

So when I think about the day worth of presentations I didn't love last year, it was almost, I didn't vet them properly. So this year I've, I've done significantly more time like consuming content of the people I might have speak, jumping on call. I've said no to so many potential speakers because I jump on a call with them.

They try and flesh out the idea. They don't really know where they're going with it. I'm like, okay, this isn't going to work.

So just being more intentional about the people that are on stage because we have so much less stage time. Well, I'll say this from being involved in conferences and event planning that I did in a previous life, uh, it's hard to think that, Ooh, I might not have enough content. So sometimes you just take stuff to fill slots.

So I hear you. And then as you, as you get, you know, better prepared each year, you, you know, okay, I can cut this, I can keep that. And you make adjustments.

Exactly. So I'm hoping to bring the best part of last year, which was the value on stage and then adding in the value of more networking, more conversations, more connection. Yeah.

I, uh, I want to make sure, I know that, uh, you've been on my podcast before. So some people listening might know you. There may be others that don't.

And I want to make sure that they hear your background. You came out of an MSP and you've only been doing this full time now is, are we fully, fully three years or is it exactly? So technically a three years in one month. So two years and 11 months currently before, you know, we launched while we were at the MSP.

Right. We've only officially been in business a year and nine months. Okay.

So I wanted to kind of get a feel for that transition, doing this for your previous company all tech solely, and then kind of branching out MSP Camp kind of on the side now full time. Um, I know that I've asked you, you know, about that transition, you know, you know, are you happy you did it? Are you happy you left and stuff? But now I want to ask you in terms of expectations, I know you're going to say you didn't expect to be this far along at this stage, but where do you see things? How do you assess the, uh, the work here over the last three years? I'm very, um, grateful that I made the decision I did. I'm very blessed to be where I'm at today.

It's been an incredible journey that obviously has been extremely, uh, challenging and stressful at times, but man, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. It's incredible. Got a great team here in Lakeland.

We've got six of us, um, and yeah, we're growing every day. Clients are happy. We're getting better.

I see kind of the channel. I see other companies in the channel. I'm like, wow, we're going to probably be able to eat their lunch in the coming years because I just see a lot of people that are getting comfortable and complacent and we're really hungry and thriving.

So that's exciting to kind of where we're going. So yeah, that's a, you know, um, I think the transitioning from being an employee to an owner wasn't that hard for me because I was the salesperson, you know, like I was closing the deals and I was like salespeople kind of are running their own little business within the business. So like that part of it actually wasn't that big of an adjustment and I was already on the leadership team at all tech.

So I was already like helping with service delivery. So like stepping out into my own role, ironically has not been that challenging when it comes to like the leadership and closing deals and growth. Like that was kind of the same thing I was doing all tech.

Um, I think more it's been like people management, like hiring, firing, like firing sucks. Hate it. Have to do it more now than I ever have.

It's the worst thing, but it's like, you know, we're a startup. We got to make tough choices and then probably one of the hardest things when is the pay cut, right? I took a big pay cut. So the last two years, you know, my, my kind of saving, I've just been, we've just been dwindling, dwindling, dwindling.

And finally, literally last month, I just, we see, I see this like the hum finally coming up. A lot of that was self-inflicted though, because I just kept putting everything back on the bit. I probably should have taken some money out, but I just, I just kept putting everything back in.

Cause I'm, I'm really focused on growth, but even with doing that now we're seeing the, we're starting to, I'm starting to see that, uh, come back up, which is exciting. All right. The wife didn't have anything to say about that as a, you need to start bringing home something.

She's been fortunately super supportive, uh, and, uh, she's just been buckling down with me for a few years and now we're starting to reap some of the benefits that come along with the stress. Very nice. Very nice.

All right. Well, uh, Tara, I know that, uh, you are in the throes of it. It is crunch time, uh, trying to get yourself ready and get out there to Louisiana.

And uh, you know, I didn't prep you for this, but I'm going to ask you if you've been to Vegas, you've been to Louisiana, so you're steadily moving the conference back East. Uh, will it, will it make it to Florida next year? It's a great question. Um, that I don't know the answer to.

I would love to do a Florida one cause man, that would make my life so much easier. We are seriously considering San Diego for next year though. Oh, so way far West, but, uh, we'll see.

All right. Well, we'll, we'll stay in touch. Uh, I will let the listeners know, uh, Tara had mentioned that he's in Lakeland.

I have a client in Lakeland, so at some point, uh, we should be doing a visit and I'll stop there by the office. I'd even do a podcast from there. So we shall see, uh, but for now, folks, again, I mentioned a ScaleCon25.

Dot. Com head over there. And if you're still available and want to head out to new Orleans and see them at the Roosevelt, that will happen.

A scale time is the 25th through the 27th. And then of course, check out MSP Camp. We didn't even talk about your, your podcast, your no fluff marketing podcast, uh, that's been killing it as well.

Thank you. So we'll have a link. We'll have a link to that.

And, uh, if you need practical knowledge that you can just simply hit the ground and run with, and, um, it's not these, well, I'm not going to say it. I don't want to get in trouble, but, uh, trouble together, uncle Marv, uh, but if you need marketing campaigns, um, they've got, uh, over 750 now happy members, uh, at the camp and, uh, 1300 custom content pieces. And I think that number should be higher than 70 plus five-star reviews.

It's probably over a hundred now. So I think you guys are coming in. Thank you.

Thank you so much, man. I appreciate you. You've seen me since the day one, like help like pitch it days.

And so it's been cool to be friends with you as this journey progresses, man. I appreciate everything you've done over the years. Well, you are so welcome, uh, folks that is going to do it for this quick episode here, uh, your insider look at, uh, scale con.

And if you found today's conversation valuable, be sure to not only subscribe to my podcast, but, uh, subscribe to the no fluffs MSP marketing podcast, but over to MP, MSP Camp, and then also check out scale con and, uh, get yourself a no pitching conference that, uh, is what some have considered the best conference that they have been to. So thanks again to Tahir. Tahar.

I always flip flop. They're both right here. It's like closer to how it's said in Arabic.

And then Tahir is what I went with. So, okay. Both right.

I just, for some reason, I get this thing. My, I gotta say it right. I gotta say it this way.

He says it this I'm like, but that's not how it works. So Tahir Hamid, uh, with, uh, MSP Camp and ScaleCon25. Thank you very much, sir.

And thank everyone for tuning in and, uh, we'll see you out there soon. And until next time, Holla! 

Thanks y'all.